“Navy Hawk-One, this is Golf, do you read, over?”
“Roger, Golf.”
“Okay, Navy. We just smoked four, repeat four, Badgers for you.”
“Make that five, Buns!” the other element leader called in.
“Something’s wrong, sir.” The radar operator on Hawk-One motioned to his scope. “We have these buggers just popped through, and they say they bagged some, gotta be three, four hundred miles away.”
“Clipper Base, this is Hawk-One, we just had contact with an Air Force ferry flight eastbound. They claim they just splashed five Badgers northbound several hundred miles north of us. Say again
northbound.”
Toland’s eyebrows went up.
“Probably some had to abort,” Baker observed. “This is close to their fuel limit, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Air/Ops. He didn’t look happy with his own answer.
“Burn-through,” announced the radar operator. “We have reacquired the targets.”
The Kelts had flown on, oblivious to the furor around them. Their radar transponders made them look like hundred-ten-foot Badgers. Their own white-noise jammers came on, somewhat obscuring them yet again on the radar scopes, and autopilot controls began to jerk them up, down, left, right, in hundred-meter leaps as an aircraft might do when trying to avoid a missile. The Kelts had been real missiles once, but on retirement from front-line service six years earlier, their warheads had been replaced with additional fuel tankage, and they had been relegated to a role as target drones, a purpose they were serving admirably now.
“Tallyho!” The first squadron of twelve Tomcats was now a hundred fifty miles away. The Kelts showed up perfectly on radar, and the intercept officers in the back seat of each fighter quickly established target tracks. The Kelts were approaching what would have been nominal missile-launch distance—if they were the bombers everyone thought they were.
The Tomcats launched a volley of million-dollar AIM-54C Phoenix missiles at a range of a hundred forty miles. The missiles blazed in on their targets at Mach-5, directed by the fighters’ targeting radars. In under a minute the forty-eight missiles had killed thirty-nine targets. The first squadron broke clear as the second came into launch position.
USS
NIMITZ
“Admiral, something is wrong here,” Toland said quietly.
“What might that be?” Baker liked the way things were going. Enemy bomber tracks were being wiped off his screen just as the war games had predicted they would.
“The Russians are coming in dumb, sir.”
“So?”
“So this far the Soviets have not been very dumb! Admiral, why aren’t the Backfires going supersonic? Why one attack group? Why one direction?”
“Fuel constraints,” Baker answered. “The Badgers are at the limit of their fuel, they have to come in direct.”
“But not the Backfires!”
“The course is right, the raid count is right.” Baker shook his head and concentrated on the tactical plot.
The second squadron of fighters had just launched. Unable to get a head-on shot, their missile accuracy suffered somewhat. They killed thirty-four targets with forty-eight missiles. There had been a hundred fifty-seven targets plotted.
The third and fourth Tomcat squadrons arrived together and launched as a group. When their Phoenixes had been fully expended, nineteen targets were left. The two fighter squadrons moved in to engage the remaining targets with their cannon.
“Clipper Base, this is SAM Boss. We’re going to have some leakers. Recommend we start lighting up SAM radars.”
“Roger, SAM Boss. Permission granted,” answered the group tactical warfare coordinator.
NORTH ATLANTIC
“I have air-search radars, bearing zero-three-seven,” the Bear ESM officer noted. “They have detected us. Recommend we illuminate also.” The Bear lit off its Big Bulge look-down radar.
USS
NIMITZ
“New radar contact. Designate Raid-2—”
“What?” snapped Baker. Next came a call from the fighters.
“Clipper Base, this is Slugger Lead. I have a visual on my target.” The squadron commander was trying to examine the target on his long-range TV camera. When he spoke, the anguish in his voice was manifest. “Warning, warning, this is not a Badger. We’ve been shooting at Kelt missiles!”
“Raid-2 is seventy-three aircraft, bearing two-one-seven, range one-three-zero miles. We have a Big Bulge radar tracking the formation,” said the CIC talker.
Toland cringed as the new contacts were plotted. “Admiral, we’ve been had.”
The group tactical warfare officer was pale as he toggled his microphone. “Air Warning Red. Weapons free! Threat axis is two-one-seven. All ships turn as necessary to unmask batteries.”
The Tomcats had all been drawn off, leaving the formation practically naked. The only armed fighters over the formation were
Foch’s
eight Crusaders, long since retired from the American inventory. On a terse command from their carrier, they went to afterburner and rocketed southwest toward the Backfires. Too late.
The Bear already had a clear picture of the American formations. The Russians could not determine ship type, but they could tell large from small, and identify the missile cruiser
Ticonderoga
by her distinctive radar emissions. The carriers would be close to her. The Bear relayed the information to her consorts. A minute later, the seventy Backfire bombers launched their hundred forty AS-6 Kingfish missiles and turned north at full military power. The Kingfish was nothing like the Kelt. Powered by a liquid-fuel rocket engine, it accelerated to nine hundred knots and began its descent, its radar-homing head tracking on a pre-programmed target area ten miles wide. Every ship in the center of the formation had several missiles assigned.
“Vampire, Vampire!” the CIC talker said aboard
Ticonderoga.
“We have numerous incoming missiles. Weapons free.”
The group antiair warfare officer ordered the cruiser’s Aegis weapons system into full automatic mode.
Tico
had been built with this exact situation in mind. Her powerful radar/computer system immediately identified the incoming missiles as hostile and assigned each a priority of destruction. The computer was completely on its own, free to fire on its electronic will at anything diagnosed as a threat. Numbers, symbols, and vectors paraded across the master tactical display. The fore and aft twin missile launchers trained out at the first targets and awaited the orders to fire. Aegis was state-of-the-art, the best SAM system yet devised, but it had one major weakness:
Tico
carried only ninety-six SM2 surface-to-air missiles; there were one hundred forty incoming Kingfish. The computer had not been programmed to think about that.
Aboard
Nimitz,
Toland could feel the carrier heeling into a radical turn, her engines advanced to flank speed, driving the massive warship at over thirty-five knots. Her nuclear-powered escorts,
Virginia
and
California,
were also tracking the Kingfish, their own missiles trained out on their launchers.
The Kingtish were at eight thousand feet, one hundred miles out, covering a mile every four seconds. Each had now selected a target, choosing the largest within their fields of view.
Nimitz
was the nearest large ship, with her missile-ship escorts to her north.
Tico
launched her first quartet of missiles as the targets reached a range of ninety-nine miles. The rockets exploded into the air, leaving a trail of pale gray smoke. They had barely cleared the launch rails when the mounts went vertical and swiveled to receive their reloads. The load-and-fire time was under eight seconds. The cruiser would average one missile fired every two seconds. Just over three minutes later, her missile magazines were empty. The cruiser emerged from the base of an enormous gray arch of smoke. Her only remaining defenses were her gun systems.
The SAMs raced in at their targets with a closing speed of over two thousand miles per hour, directed in by the reflected waves of the ship’s own fire-control radars. At a range of a hundred fifty yards from their targets, the warheads detonated. The Aegis system did quite well. Just over 60 percent of the targets were destroyed. There were now eighty-two incoming missiles targeted on a total of eight ships.
Other missile-equipped ships joined the fray. In several cases two or three missiles were sent for the same target, usually killing it. The number of incoming “vampires” dropped to seventy, then sixty, but the number was not dropping quickly enough. The identity of the targets was now known to everyone. Powerful active jamming equipment came on. Ships began a radical series of maneuvers like some stylized dance, with scant attention paid to station-keeping. Collision at sea was now the least of anyone’s worries. When the Kingfish got to within twenty miles, every ship in the formation began to fire off chaff rockets, which filled the air with millions of aluminized Mylar fragments that fluttered on the air, creating dozens of new targets for the missiles to select from. Some of the Kingfish lost lock with their targets and started chasing Mylar ghosts. Two of them got lost, and selected new targets on the far side of the formation.
The radar picture on
Nimitz
suddenly was obscured. What had been discrete pips designating the positions of ships in the formation became shapeless clouds. Only the missiles stayed constant: inverted V-shapes, with line vectors to designate direction and speed. The last wave of SAMs killed three more. The vampire count was down to forty-one. Toland counted five heading for
Nimitz.
Topside, the final defensive weapons were now tracking the targets. These were the CIWS, 20mm Gatling guns, radar-equipped to explode incoming missiles at a range of under two thousand yards. Designed to operate in a fully automatic mode, the two after gun mounts on the carrier angled up and began to track the first pair of incoming Kingfish. The portside mount fired first, the six-barrel cannon making a sound like that of an enormous zipper. Its radar system tracked the target, and tracked the outgoing slugs, adjusting fire to make the two meet.
The leading Kingfish exploded eight hundred yards from
Nimitz’s
port quarter. The thousand kilograms of high explosive rocked the ship. Toland felt it, wondering if the ship had been hit. Around him, the CIC crewmen were concentrating frantically on their jobs. One target track vanished from the screen. Four left.
The next Kingfish approached the carrier’s bow and was blasted out of the sky by the forward CIWS, too close aboard. Fragments ripped across the carrier’s deck, killing a dozen exposed crewmen.
Number three was decoyed by a chaff cloud and ran straight into the sea half a mile behind the carrier. The warhead caused the carrier to vibrate and raised a column of water a thousand feet into the air.
The fourth and fifth missiles came in from aft, not a hundred yards apart. The after gun mount tracked on both, but couldn’t decide which to engage first. It went into Reset mode and petulantly didn’t engage any. The missiles hit within a second of one another, one on the after port corner of the flight deck, the other on the number two arrestor wire.
Toland was thrown fifteen feet, and slammed against a radar console. Next he saw a wall of pink flame that washed briefly over him. Then came the noises. First the thunder of the explosion. Then the screams. The after CIC bulkhead was no longer there; instead there was a mass of flame. Men twenty feet away were ablaze, staggering and screaming before his eyes. Toland’s only thought was escape. He bolted for the watertight door. It opened miraculously under his hand and he ran to starboard. The ship’s fire-suppression systems were already on, showering everything with a curtain of saltwater. His skin burned from it as he emerged, hair and uniform singed, to the flight deck catwalk. A sailor directed a water hose on him, nearly knocking him over the side.
“Fire in CIC!” Toland gasped.
“What the hell ain’t!” the sailor screamed.
Toland fell to his knees and looked outboard.
Foch
had been to their north, he remembered. Now there was a pillar of smoke. As he watched, the last Kingfish was detonated a hundred feet over
Saratoga’s
flight deck. The carrier seemed undamaged. Three miles away,
Ticonderoga’s
after superstructure was shredded and ablaze from a rocket that had blown up within yards of her. On the horizon a ball of flame announced the destruction of yet another—
my God,
Toland thought,
might that be Saipan?
She had two thousand Marines aboard . . .
“Get forward, you dumbass!” a firefighter yelled at him. Another man emerged to the catwalk.
“Toland, you all right?” It was Captain Svenson, his shirt torn away and his chest bleeding from a half-dozen cuts.
“Yes, sir,” Bob answered.
“Get to the bridge. Tell ’em to put the wind on the starboard beam. Move!” Svenson jumped up onto the flight deck.
Toland did likewise, racing forward. The deck was awash in firefighting foam, slippery as oil. Toland ran recklessly, falling hard on the deck before he reached the carrier’s island. He was in the pilothouse in under a minute.
“Captain says put the wind on the starboard beam!” Toland said.
“It
is
on the fucking beam!” the executive officer snapped back. The bridge deck was covered with broken glass. “How’s the skipper?”
“Alive. He’s aft with the fire.”
“And who the hell are you?” the XO demanded.
“Toland, group intel. I was in CIC.”
“Then you’re one lucky bastard. That second bird hit fifty yards from you. Captain got out? Anyone else?”
“I don’t know. Burning like hell.”
“Looks like you caught part of it, Commander.”
Bob’s face felt as if he’d shaved with a piece of glass. His eyebrows crumpled to his touch. “Flashburns, I guess. I’ll be okay. What do you want me to do?”